Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America, One Step at a Time

The cities with the most congestion are often the cities that provide the best alternatives to being stuck in congestion. Of the ten cities ranked worst for traffic in the 2010 Urban Mobility Report,18 all but three—Houston, Dallas, and Atlanta—have excellent public transit and a vast collection of walkable neighborhoods. Indeed, these seven cities

The General Theory of Walkability explains how, to be favored, a walk has to satisfy four main conditions: it must be useful, safe, comfortable, and interesting.

That said, not all bus systems are duds—far from it. The most remarkable one nationally may be Boulder’s, an inexpensive network that confounds conventional transit wisdom in a number of important ways. Thanks to its system of cleverly branded routes—including the Hop, Skip, and Jump, with each route getting its own color—the city is living up to i

Enrique Peñalosa, the former mayor of Bogotá, Colombia, sees things in a much simpler light: “God made us walking animals—pedestrians. As a fish needs to swim, a bird to fly, a deer to run, we need to walk, not in order to survive, but to be happy.”

It is fascinating to talk to blind people about push-button walk signals. They push the button and wait for a lull in the noise. But then they can’t tell if what they hear is a red light, or just a gap in the speedy traffic. The alternative are those annoying chirping signals that now mark the pace of daily life in crunchy towns like Northampton, M

MANHATTAN AS MECCA If—in America—dense, transit-served cities are better, then New York is the best. This is the clear and convincing message of David Owen’s Green Metropolis, certainly the most important environmental text of the past decade. This book deserves a bit more of our attention, so profound is the revolution in thinking that it represen

This creative leap leads us to Shoup’s third cornerstone, the institution of “parking benefit districts” that put meter revenues to work locally.60 In addition to improving sidewalks, trees, lighting, and street furniture, these districts can bury overhead wires, renovate storefronts, hire public service officers, and of course keep everything spic

What’s most interesting—and perhaps a bit frustrating—about this solution is that it does not address the parking supply directly. Every one of these cities still has a downtown parking requirement, some quite high.35 But instead of providing parking, businesses are only required to pay for it, which allows the parking to be located in the right pl

the demand for downtown housing is significant and it is about to skyrocket. But supply will have a hard time meeting demand unless cities become politically committed to its provision and lend a hand. Building new housing downtown is an expensive and punishing process: unlike the suburban greenfield sites that most developers are accustomed to, ci